Troubleshooting

Fixes for the most common Form Notifications issues. Still stuck? Contact us.

Where did my notifications go?

They are rules now. If you set up Form Notifications before the rule-first editor, each recipient group of a notification became one rule with the same message, recipients and conditions, and the editor showed a one-time banner: Your notifications are now rules. Nothing changed in what gets sent. A notification that required approval became a rule set to only after approval, by the approver it already had. Nothing needs redoing. See Rules.

My rule didn't send

Work through the rule:

• Is the rule turned on? (It turns itself off if it has validation errors; the row says Has errors.)
• Does Send when match? A rule set to only after approval only fires after its approver approves a matching response.
• Did the submission actually match the Only if conditions?
• For an email rule: does it have at least one recipient (a typed email, the respondent, or a form field)? If the only recipient is the respondent or a form field, did that response provide a valid email address? If not, that submission is skipped by design.
• Does the editor show an "Email permission is turned off" warning? Sending needs the "Send email as you" permission. Click Allow email sending in the warning to grant it. See permissions you can decline.
• Is the rule paused? Chat, webhook rules and any rule with an approval step pause when the trial or license ends. See below.

If everything looks right, open your form's trigger list (Extensions, Apps Script, Triggers) and confirm an onFormSubmit trigger for Form Notifications is present.

I copied a form and rules stopped

When you make a copy of a Google Form, Google copies your questions and your Form Notifications settings, but it does not carry over the behind-the-scenes trigger that runs on each submission. This is a Google Forms limitation with copies.

Fix: open Form Notifications once on the copied form. That re-creates the trigger. You only need to do this once per copy.

Emails suddenly stopped on a busy form

You may have hit your Google account's daily sending limit (about 100 emails/day on personal Gmail, 1,500/day on Workspace). Email rules send from your own account and count against that limit. It resets after about 24 hours. See Sending & Delivery Limits.

Every recent submission shows "Send failed"

When the history shows a run of failed sends, the sender account is usually the problem (the editor shown as the sender; emails go out from one account, even on forms with several editors):

• The sender may have declined the "Send email as you" permission. Sends fail until they grant it (how). The editor shows a warning when it detects this pattern.
• If you are a co-editor, Take over sending (in the warning) switches the sender to your account. New submissions then send from you.

The person who set up the rules left

Emails are sent by one editor's account. If that person loses access to the form (leaves the organization, uninstalls the add-on), sending stops silently: responses keep arriving but nothing is emailed. The editor detects this and shows an "Emails may have stopped sending" warning; click Take over sending to continue sending from your own account.

What still works after my trial ends?

The editor shows an upgrade banner, but your email rules on every response keep sending, and you can still create and edit them; nothing you set up breaks for respondents. The paid features pause, and rules that use them cannot be edited until you upgrade: Slack, Discord, Teams and webhook rules, and any rule with an approval step (skipped submissions are visible in the history). Upgrading unlocks those rules and resumes them for new submissions. See what needs a license.

A Slack, Discord, Teams or webhook rule says "Paused"

The endpoint answered HTTP 404 or 410, so it no longer exists: the incoming webhook was deleted in the chat app, or the Zap, scenario or server route was removed. Form Notifications paused the rule and emailed you once. Create a new webhook URL in the app, edit the rule, paste it under Replace, and save. The rule resumes for new submissions.

Other failures (a timeout, a 5xx error) do not pause anything: the delivery is retried once and then logged in the History with its HTTP status.

A rule says "Approver paused"

The rule's channel approver answered HTTP 404 or 410, so its webhook URL no longer exists. Nobody in the channel saw that approval request, so it was emailed to the rule's owner, with the same Approve and Reject buttons. Until you fix it, every new request goes to the owner by email. Create a new webhook URL in the chat app, open the rule's approver, paste it, and save. The History shows each request that went to the owner, and why.

If posting fails for another reason (a timeout, a 5xx error), that one request is emailed to the owner too, but the approver is not paused.

The webhook arrives but the signature doesn't match

• Compute the HMAC over the raw request body bytes, before any JSON parsing or re-serialising. Frameworks that parse JSON automatically change the whitespace.
• Compare against the full header value including the sha256= prefix, in lower-case hex.
• If you regenerated the secret with New signing secret, the old one stopped working as soon as you saved.

See verifying the signature.

A rule set to "Only after approval" never fires

• It needs its approver to actually decide; the event follows their decision, not the submission itself.
• The rule's Only if conditions still apply: a response that doesn't match never reaches that approver.
• An email rule with an approval step needs an active license (the trial counts); without one, the submission is logged as paused.

Two rules share an approver but they got one request

That is by design. Approval is per approver, not per rule: a response that matches several rules waiting on the same approver creates one request, and every matching rule fires on that one decision. A rule waiting on a different approver gets its own request. See one request per approver.

Emails are going to spam

• Set a reply-to address on the rule (Message, Sender and reply-to). A real reply address makes recipients and mail providers more likely to trust the message.
• On a managed Google Workspace domain, ask your admin to confirm the domain's email-security settings are not filtering messages sent through the add-on.

The wrong Google account is shown

Account questions, including the wrong Google account appearing, are covered in our Common Questions.